Need a Hand Drying Those Gloves?

While being caught out in the rain skiing, [Andrew] was left with a pair of soaking wet gloves. Leaving them to air dry did little good, as after 3 days they were still wet, and blowing a fan at them did little to nothing to help the situation. Luckily [Andrew] had been thinking about ways to make a forced air glove drier for some time now using standard plumbing fittings.

A prototype was made similar to consumer models where the glove is fit over the end of a pipe, and while this worked great to dry the palms, it did not help the wet finger situation at all. In order to solve this issue a new design was whipped up featuring 4 fixed fingers and a movable thumb made out of copper pipe. A little drilling, and soldering was performed then the metal hand was then duct taped to the end of a hair drier, turning soaked gloves into perfectly dry ones in about three hours.

As one who has killed hair dryers by using them to do other drying task I agree. Hair dryers are not made with much of a duty cycle in mind. I wonder if just air blown though the copper hand without heat would dry them as fast. The copper hand is definitely an improvement of just blowing air at the one open end. I could see having two of these hands mounted on a box that holds a blower. The trick would be to get a blower that could get up enough pressure to force the air up the tube and out of the gloves.

if i were to try this, i think it would be easier on the hair drier motor to widen the inlet, and add a branch Y for the other glove to do both gloves simultaneously. i would also drill machine gun holes throughout the fingers and palm

did it really take 3 hours to do one? i don’t think hand held hair driers would endure that prolonged running time well, and consider the electric bill (and noise).

i think this would work well with also drying gloves in a conventional drier

Interesting execution. I worry about the point heat at the tips, I did a quick google to see what was out there. Most interesting find was the attached link, look at the way they flow the air through it?

The only thing I have against this hack is that I don’t understand the problem in the first place. Over many years of sledding then snowboarding then snowmobiling I have had a lot of soaking wet gloves. I have dried them successfully overnight a bunch of different ways. I’ve set them near a wood burning stove, onto of electric baseboard heaters, on top of old-timey radiators, and thrown them in the dryer. I even had a friend that put his oven on low heat with the door cracked. All these worked well.

We ski alot (here in Western Colorado), and with three kids, that’s 5 pair of gloves to dry. Besides everyone having two pairs of gloves (or more), we just put them in a pillow case, tie it shut, and pop it in the dryer. The pillow case keeps all the zippers/buckles/clips from scratching the dryer drum. On low temp, it usually takes just one trip (two if the gloves are soaking wet inside and out).

At the museum where I work we acquired several Russian space artifacts a few years back including some space suits. When we opened the crates we found in among the items a sort of hand shaped item with perforations on the “fingers” and “palm”. The whole thing was connected with rubber tubing. After a bit of digging we found that it was an official Soviet era spacesuit glove drying apparatus. (Hands get sweaty when you’re sealed up in a “rubber bag”.) This build immediately reminded me of that. Unfortunately can’t seem to find my photos of it at the moment.